Industry 4.0 – risks and opportunities

How will we live in the future? Self-driving cars, floating cities? We have come up with some thoughts that may sound a bit Hollywood, but many of which are only a matter of time:

Will we soon feed on algae and insects instead of steak? How will it be possible to cover the need for protein of 10 billion people?

Where are all those people to live when the mega cities are bursting at the seams? In floating cities?

The world, individual continents, countries, cities and even companies will be confronted with huge challenges in the decades to come – challenges that hold unimagined opportunities, but also big risks. What effects are future developments having on today’s and tomorrow’s business concepts?

We have put some thought into this, and some of the ideas sound like they might have been spawned in Hollywood, but many of them are foreseeable: for example, medical technology will make incredible advances and offer things like bionic limbs that may well be better than the original.

On the flip side, insurance companies, for instance, are going gray at the thought of self-driving motor vehicles: no driver, no driver’s insurance. There are innumerable examples of how entire markets and industries are being revolutionized: the MP3 music format and iTunes, for example, were the death knoll for the CD, its peripheral devices and an entire industry.

What disruptive technologies, products and trends can be seen looming on the horizon already?